


Winter Without You

by Safeathome



Series: The Red Winter series [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Multi, Parent Bucky Barnes, Parent Natasha Romanov, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Natasha Romanov
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 06:50:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19312861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safeathome/pseuds/Safeathome
Summary: There are ten words used to activate the Winter Soldier. They each contain bits of forgotten memories. Read forwards, they tell him what to do. Read backwards, they tell his stories.A prologue for my upcoming novel of an undisclosed title.





	1. Freight

**Author's Note:**

> For Natalia,
> 
> Darling, dearest, dead.

**Freight**

 

He carries his memories with him. They are buried somewhere inside his mind and though he has difficulty remembering even the slightest details of his own life, he remembers what a freight train looks like. Closing his eyes, he can hear the scraping of the wheels on the tracks, he can see the different compartments, and he can feel the cold air that whips his hair in every direction.

 

Freight must have meant something, he decides after careful consideration. There is too much feeling behind the words for it to not mean anything.

 

He writes the word down on an empty page in a notebook.

 

_F R E I G H T_

 

He stares at the word until he becomes angry at it. His mind hurts when he thinks about it.

 


	2. One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Natalia,
> 
> My love for you will live forever.
> 
> You however, did not.

**One**

 

He commits her image to memory the first time after he meets her. He thinks she does, too, with the way she looks at him so intensely. Green eyes roam across his body, taking in every inch of his physicality. She hesitates for a moment at his silver arm but then moves onto the rest of him. He realizes she is sizing him up, getting a clearer picture of her opponent, assessing his weak points.

 

He wonders if she finds any.

 

He is told that he is to train her from now on and he follows their orders, leading her to an abandoned practice room and starting with the basics. 

 

He holds onto the image of her in the practice room late at night when his body is heavy with fatigue but his mind is too awake to sleep. She is fast. Incredibly fast. So fast she managed to capture his arm between her legs before he flipped them over on the training mat and pinned her to the ground. He has her beneath him and she stares up at him with her emerald eyes, both panting for breath. She asks him to show her again in her husky voice and he complies.

 

In his boredom, his mind travels up the grand staircase and into the left wing, four rooms down into Natalia’s room. He thinks about the color of her hair and her eyes and the smoothness of her skin. He imagines running his hands down the sides of her body, feeling her with both metal and flesh. Imagines the delicious sounds she would make when he kissed her neck and pulled her hair.

 

He could see about her right now. He could experience those things now if he wanted to.

 

His body aches to think about how easy it would be to sneak into her room right now. He could do it. He could see her right now if he wanted to. It would only take him a few minutes of crawling through the ceiling vents and then he would be there, standing over her, asking her to show him her soul.

 

Pausing, he wonders what her answer would be. The other girls retract at the sight of the metal limb at his side but Natalia doesn’t. Natalia doesn’t flinch when his hands come in contact with her skin.

 

 _Maybe she is better at hiding it_ , he thinks, _maybe I repulse her, too._

 

He could wish and hope and pray and ask to touch her all he wants but if she didn’t say yes, it would all be for naught. His wishes were nothing without her consent.

 

There is one thing driving him to the brink of his own insanity right now and her name is Natalia. Alternatively, there is one thing keeping him sane and her name also happens to be Natalia.


	3. Homecoming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Natalia,
> 
> Our love broke my heart-
> 
> And stopped yours.

**Homecoming**

 

 _Return_.

 

He wants to return.

 

He strains his mind until he’s exhausted trying to remember anything about the life he had before this.

 

They tell him that this is all he had ever known but he doesn’t believe it. There is something inside him that tells him it is all wrong, completely and utterly wrong.

 

It’s the arm. Whenever he looks at the shiny metal, his body starts to ache. It feels like he’s been dropped off the side of a mountain, hitting every rock on the way down.

 

He doesn’t know what kind of life he had before this, but he wants to return.

 

_What kind of homecoming would he receive?_

_Would he receive one at all?_


	4. Benign

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Natalia,
> 
> I would much prefer it if you were alive and well.

**Benign**

 

She is kind to him. And because he had no memory, perhaps she was kinder than anyone had been his entire life.

 

He needs it- needs her. Needs her to speak softly in the way that only she knows how.He’s not sure if she realizes it but the seductive voice that Red Room taught her to use when speaking to men don’t transfer over when she is talking to him. Many of the male teachers at the academy find themselves entranced by it. They know what she is doing for they taught her everything she knows, and yet they are forbidden to touch her so she uses her training against them.

 

He knows she would never use it with him.

 

She is careful to be genuine around him. Says only the words she really means, nothing more, nothing less. Touching him only when she knows he’ll reciprocate because there are days when his ghosts come back to haunt him and her touch could send him spiraling into rage.

 

He basks in the feeling of her proximity. Her skin brushing against him. Her bare knuckles graze his jaw, his hand catches her arm and sends her back into a wall. She smiles slightly before she traps him in between her legs and he smiles back because he always ends up between her legs. The bond between them grows deeper through these moments of intimacy. Their souls share the same energy, the same shared experiences.

 

If he had been assigned to anyone else, he is sure he wouldn’t be alive. If not for Natasha, he would have surely put a bullet through his brain.

 

He tries to be kind, too.


	5. Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Natalia,
> 
> You will always be in my heart, 
> 
> in my mind, 
> 
> and in your grave

**Nine**

 

When he wakes up, he is operated on immediately.

 

They replace his old arm with a new one.

 

They take his memories again, hiding them from him.

 

They call him James and say he is needed.

 

James becomes nothing ~~~~more than another object, an asset.

 

There are nine others that are exactly like him.

 

They, too, are humans made into nothing but weapons.

 

They have been there longer, but he is stronger.

 

She makes him feel good, ~~he is human again.~~


	6. Furnace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Natalia,
> 
> Summer without you is as cold as winter.
> 
> Winter without you is even colder.

**Furnace**

 

His metal arm is forged in the flames of a furnace. It burns hot and he is forced to sit still while they take it directly from the flames and over the stub of his arm, searing the flesh and metal into one entity.

 

He would scream if he could but he can’t so he doesn’t. The mouth guard they placed between his teeth stops him from shattering them.

 

The arm will not be a part of him for long. They are always updating the tech on their weapons and soon enough, they are going to rip the metal off and place a new version on.

 

He wishes more than anything they would just kill him already.

 

He knows they won’t.


	7. Daybreak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Natalia,
> 
> When we met, my life began.
> 
> Soon afterwards, yours ended.

**Daybreak**

 

The night he slips into her room is the night he is liberated. Carefully crawling through the vents until he reaches her, James is relieved that he isn’t caught before he can see her.

 

In the year that James has been here, he still hasn’t recovered his memories and the doctors say he never will but he still tries to remember if any girl had ever meant this much to him. All he can remember is that he had always been fond of redheads.

 

She kisses him softly when he removes the handcuff from her wrist. Her gentle touch surprises him because it is a stark contrast from her ferocity in the training room. She pushes him back onto the pillows softly, promising to take care of him. He feels himself grow at the husky tone of her voice that promises things neither of them can really fulfill.

 

At dawn he is still in her bed, counting the individual eyelashes of her eye, admiring her smooth skin, and clasping her wrist in his metal arm because she can’t sleep without the handcuff keeping her to the bedpost.

 

He promises to take care of her, too, if only for a night.


	8. Seventeen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Natalia,
> 
> When we met, you were pretty, I was lonely.
> 
> Now I’m pretty lonely.

**Seventeen**

 

She is seventeen and already has more life experience than most. Within the walls of Red Room she has learned to keep her guard up, to hold everyone at a distance, to calculate her moves ahead of the others. By far, she is the best weapon the academy had to offer and he knows it when they assign him to train her. She absorbs his teachings like a sponge. Everything she learned before him was nothing compared to the knowledge he bestows upon her.

 

She is seventeen and he is a ghost of a man. A creature of flesh and metal with holes in his mind. The rest of the girls are scared of him. He drags himself silently down hallways, lurking in shadows, constantly on the verge of losing his control again. What alarms the girls even more is that she is right behind him and together they become the image ofsheer terror.

 

She is seventeen and she makes him feel human again. Her name becomes a secret prayer on his lips that he repeats like a mantra. On the nights he feels bold enough to sneak into her room, she is his salvation. He worships her as if she put the sun they rarely saw into the sky. They keep their relationship a secret because he wants her light to himself.

 

She is seventeen and she is promised to another man. He is a renowned pilot made famous by his service to the Soviet Union. Red Room tells her to rejoice, for she, too, would be doing a service to her country. She agrees but in her mind she is decided. She will marry the pilot, but she likes James much better.

 

She is seventeen and they are in love. They are so in sync that together they are intense. They complete each other in ways they could have never imagined. It is not realistic but they talk about a life away from Red Room, perhaps in the Italian countryside in a house of their own. The thought makes him laugh but she is kept up all night thinking about it.

 

She is seventeen and she loves him and they punish her for it. They drag him back to the ice again and she tries to take the blame for him. They rip her insides out and she is nothing more than a weapon once again. Injected with super-soldier serum, she is made to withstand decades, remaining as their weapon and deep in her heart she knows he is, too. They will both live longer than they are supposed to but they won’t live together and that is their punishment.

 

She is seventeen and she is told that love is for children.


	9. Rusted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Natalia, 
> 
> My love flew like a butterfly, 
> 
> Til death swooped down like a bat. 
> 
> As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said, 
> 
> "That's the end of that.”

**__Rusted**

 

The next time he is needed, his mind is blurry again. There is nothing there this time.

 

They operate on him for days on end, shattering his mind, tearing his body to shreds, reprogramming him back to nothing. It’s torture for him. Pure and unfiltered agony rips through his body with every slice of a scalpel.

 

They don’t bother giving him anything that could help lessen the pain. He will heal at a faster rate than normal humans do and it would be a waste to even try, they reason. He forces himself to focus on a section of the wall where rust is slowly eating its way through the metal paneling.

 

The color of rust gives him an odd sense of calmness. Red shouldn’t be a calming color but it is. He isn’t sure what connection he has to it but he writes the feeling down on a scrap of paper later in his messy scrawl, folding it and then tucking it into his uniform to keep it close to his heart.

 

They paint a star on his new arm. It is red. He stares at it in the reflection of the metal surface of a cabinet nearby. He feels less terrible.


End file.
